The Gorilla Radio archive can be found at: www.Gorilla-Radio.com. G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in State and Corporate media. Gorilla Radio airs live Thursdays between 11-12 noon Pacific Time. Airing in Victoria at 101.9FM, and featured on the internet at: http://cfuv.ca and www.pacificfreepress.com. And check out Pacific Free Press on Twitter @Paciffreepress

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Paper Kindling for War Propaganda: Using Jews to Ignite Ukraine

The newspaper clipping pinned to my wall bears the date: Friday, May 19, 2006. It's yellowed headline, in 20 point caps says: 'IRAN EYES BADGES FOR JEWS.' Though the version on my wall emanated from Canada's National Post newspaper, variations of the copy appeared across the country the same day, and indeed featured on Israel-friendly covers around the world.

Beneath the headline is a large, black and white photograph of a man and woman standing shoulder to shoulder in winter dress and looking directly into the camera. Behind them a snow-blown and deserted city street. The streetscape is generic; it could be any city in America, Europe, or almost anywhere, but the pale piece of cloth in the shape of the Star of David sewn over the heart on each of the pair's overcoats stamps indelibly the time.

The hatted man's expression is not blank, or impassive so much as fixedly determined to remain inscrutable. His moustache is trimmed, his scarf and coat expensive, but worn. The woman's hair is tied in a scarf, her coat second-hand and looking more like a man's, perhaps once belonging to the man she stands beside now.

Her hands are in her pockets, her shoulders slightly stooped as if by the cold, her head tilting a little to the right, towards her partner in the picture. Her eyes betray a lively intelligence, her subtle, crooked smile a mischievous humour. Below the couple, the caption reads:

"A Jewish couple wear stars in the Budapest ghetto, 1944. The Nazis required the stars be worn to distinguish Jews from non-Semites. Now, the government of Iran is formulating a law to require non-Muslims to wear distinctive colours: yellow for Jews, red for Christians."

The article and its evocative accompanying photo were printed at the height of a concerted media campaign to expand America's wars in western Asia to Iran. The drum beat for that expansive carnage hasn't faltered so much as modulated in pitch ever since. That the article's main contention was false, proven a fabrication cut, as they say, from whole cloth, mattered little when revealed a couple days after the sensational "news" spread across media platforms around the globe. The news cycle just moved along.

February 17, 2014 dateline: Donetsk, Ukraine. A sonorous U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry appears before the cameras of the world in a Geneva press conference alongside his British counterpart, Baroness Catherine Ashton to denounce reports Jews living in Donetsk, a restive area of Eastern Ukraine resisting the Kiev-based coup regime, were delivered leaflets demanding they register with separatist officials, or face fines and/or property forfeiture.

This "news" too spread across the world in a blink, coming as it did during the Jewish high holiday of Passover. Thanks to the imprimatur of Secretary Kerry, the report shared prominent air space with other news of developments in Ukraine, helping propel NATO's bellicose language and demands Russia surrender its former territory to the western-backed coup.

Less covered by the international media were later revelations the "official" leaflet was at best a hoax, and perhaps part of a much darker program involving the real life neo-Nazi actors employed by America's National Endowment for Democracy to bring down the government of Ukraine's erstwhile, and democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Here's a photo of the fraudulent leaflet, replete with the London Daily Mail's "sinister" caption.

Sinister: A leaflet distributed in Donetsk, Ukraine calling for all Jews over 16 years old to 'register'. The leaflet also
demanded the city's Jews supply a detailed list of all the property they
own, or else have their citizenship revoked - DailyMail.co.uk

Asia Times correspondent, Pepe Escobar summarizes John Kerry's and the media occlusion of the facts well in his article, 'On Nazis, Jews and Ukraine 'De-escalation,' saying;

"The State Department, for all its sleek machinery, would not even bother to verify that real anti-Semitic posturing had in fact been coming out of regime changer neo-Nazi outfits of the Right Sector kind, coupled with the warning by Rabbi Reuven Azman of Kiev for Jews to leave Ukraine."

"A not-so-subtle push to imprint in misinformed layers of public opinion the toxic tie-up between Russophobia and anti-Semitism."

Utilizing previous misinformation exercises, Canada's Prime Minister traveled to Ukraine to stand next to the Kiev coup's "Prime Minister," Arseniy Yatsenyuk to condemn Russia's leadership, and promise further sanctions against some of President Putin's friends doing business in the West.

Harper chided Putin, saying;

"When a major power acts in a way that is so clearly aggressive, militaristic, and imperialistic, this represents a significant threat to the peace and stability of the world, and it's time we all recognized the depth and the seriousness of that threat."

In the wake of the phony leaflet campaign, and perhaps convinced Canadian public opinion had been sufficiently massaged to allow another armed adventure abroad, Harper pledged military support to bolster the growing NATO force amassing along Ukraine's borders. After accusing Vladimir Putin of "returning international relations to the law of the jungle," Harper smiled for the cameras and shook the hand of the man put into power by neo-Nazi thugs and murderers.

Regarding international lawlessness, the widely respected American scholar, specializing in Russian studies, Stephen Cohen observes of the Western position during the run-up to the current "crisis;"

“One last point, also something that nobody in this country wants to talk about: The Western authorities, who bear some responsibility for what’s happened, and who therefore also have blood on their hands, are taking no responsibility. They’re uttering utterly banal statements, which, because of their vacuous nature, are encouraging and rationalizing the people in Ukraine who are throwing Molotov cocktails, now have weapons, are shooting at police. We wouldn’t permit that in any Western capital, no matter how righteous the cause, but it’s being condoned by the European Union and Washington as events unfold.”

Those events unfolded further in the killings by sniper fire of at least 20 protesters and police in Kiev's Maidan, or 'Independence Square.' Initially blamed on the Yanukovych government, responsibility for those killings is now being lain at the feet of Stephen Harper's friend and fellow Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

On April 10, 2014, Germany's TV ARD aired the results of their investigation into the sniper attacks of February 20th, focusing on the involvement of both the "new government of Ukraine" and foreign mercenaries. It was information that had already been hinted at by Minister of Foreign Affairs of Estonia Urmas Paet to High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union, Baroness Ashton on February 26, 2014. The irony of all this seems entirely lost on John Kerry, Stephen Harper, Catherine Ashton, and their acolytes in the Western press.

At this date, it appears, the only hope left for averting another disastrous war and conflagration is the good sense of NATO principals, something entirely absent these recent years, and a polity not swayed by the bald-faced claims made by bellicose leaders, dutifully repeated and passed off as honest reportage by a fatally flawed media.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Donetsk resisting the coup government are being portrayed in that media as "pro-Russia militants," determined to undermine their "legitimate" rulers in Kiev.

Havoc in the Kingdom

Survival is the key word to understand the Saudi dynasty’s latest external and internal policies. These are designed to pre-empt change but paradoxically they are creating more enemies in a changing world order marked by turbulent regional geopolitics and growing internal demands for change.

The seventy-year old strategic oil for security US-Saudi alliance seemed about to crack on its 69th anniversary ahead of the summit meeting of US President Barak Obama and king Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz in March.

With the US now committed to pivoting east and possibly on track to become an oil exporter by 2017, American and Saudi policies are no longer identical.

Former US President George W. Bush’s democracy campaign, which Saudi opposed, alerted its rulers to be on guard. The Arab popular protests since 2011 pushed them into leading a regional defensive counterrevolution and ever since the gap in bilateral relations has been widening.

The Saudis could not trust the US’ “regime change” strategy in the region, which depends on the Muslim Brotherhood International (MBI) as an instrument of change, sponsored by a regional rival like Turkey and a co-member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), like Qatar, which has been for long contesting the Saudi leadership of the GCC, the Saudi leading role in Arab politics and the Saudi political representation of Sunni Muslims.

This trilateral alliance of Qatar, Turkey and the MBI would develop into a real threat to Saudi’s survival if it was allowed to deliver change in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere in the region. It might quickly leave Saudi Arabia as the next target for “change.”

The US pillar of Saudi security now seems to be in doubt as the United States stands unable to meet Saudi expectations on almost all the most critical issues in the Middle East, from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Saudi-Iran conflict and the ongoing bloody conflict in Syria, let alone the conflict with the MBI, especially in Egypt.

Within this context, using the MBI as an instrument for “regime change” in the region has created a Saudi MBI phobia. Change is overdue in the kingdom, but, after decades of intensive Islamic education, change could only come camouflaged in Islamist form.

“It might seem ironic for a Wahhabi theocracy to oppose so forcefully a party that mixes religion with politics. But it is precisely because the monarchy bases its legitimacy on Islam that it fears Brotherhood rivalry,” journalist Roula Khalaf wrote in the Financial Times in March.

Obama doesn’t seem capable of mending the bilateral fences. His refusal to fight Saudi regional wars reminds them that he is the same man who as a state senator back in 2002 stated that:

“Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East – the Saudis and the Egyptians – stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies.”

However, as demonstrated by Obama’s visit to the kingdom on March 28, the bilateral differences will remain tactical, while the strategic alliance will hold until the kingdom finds a credible alternative to its American security guarantor, although this seems an unrealistic development in the foreseen future.

Regional Shifts

Regionally, the kingdom is not faring better. The US-promoted and Saudi–advocated anti-Iran “front” of regional “moderates,” with Israel as an undercover partner, seems now a forgone endeavor.

The Saudi call for converting the GCC “council” into a “union” is now dead.

Oman’s public threat to withdraw from the GCC should it transform into a union and the Saudi current rift with Qatar threaten the GCC’s very existence.

Saudi invitation to Jordan and Morocco to join the GCC was unwelcome by other GCC members and by Morocco.

In Bahrain, the kingdom has intervened militarily to squash a three-year old ongoing democratic uprising.

The latest Kuwait-hosted Arab summit meeting did not see eye to eye with Saudi on Syria.

Forming a Lebanese government without Hezbullah and its pro-Syria coalition has failed.

Egypt’s calls for a “political solution” in Syria and its refusal to give the Syrian Arab League seat to the opposition could not be interpreted as a friendly position from a country that Saudi Arabia has bailed out, in exchange for its transition away from a MBI rule.

Turkey is at odds with the Egyptian-Saudi newly found partnership.

Iraq is accusing the kingdom of waging a “war” against it, with Saudi now the only country to not have a permanent ambassador to Iraq.

Meanwhile, the kingdom continues to deal with Iran as an “existential threat.”

In the background, the Israeli threat could never be overlooked.

Self-confidence Challenged

Using petrodollars as soft power to gain influence abroad and secure loyalty internally, the kingdom seems self-confident enough, or overconfident, to feel secured on its own.

Speaking at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on March 11, Prince Turki al–Faisal, chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research & Islamic Studies in Riyadh and former Saudi Ambassador to the US, said:

“Saudi Arabia represents over 20% of the combined GDP of the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region (and over a quarter of the Arab World’s GDP) making it … an effective partner and member of the G20.

“The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), the Kingdom’s central bank, is the world’s third largest holder of net foreign assets … Last but not least, Saudi Aramco, the Kingdom’s national oil company, is the world’s largest producer and exporter of petroleum and has by far the world’s largest sustained production capacity infrastructure.”

“Sixty percent of Saudis are 20 or younger, most of whom have no hope of a job,” House wrote in her 2012 book.

“Seventy percent of Saudis cannot afford to own a home. Forty percent live below the poverty line. The royals, 25,000 princes and princesses, own most of the valuable land and benefit from a system that gives each a stipend and some a fortune. Foreign workers make the Kingdom work; the 19 million Saudi citizens share the Kingdom with 8.5 million guest workers.”

According to House, regional differences are “a daily fact of Saudi life.” Hejazis in the West and Shiites in the East resent the strict Wahhabi lifestyle. Gender discrimination is a growing problem. Sixty percent of Saudi college graduates are women but they account for only twelve percent of the work force.

Moreover, according to Anthony H. Cordesman, published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) on April 21, 2011, “There are serious gaps between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots,’ regional differences in wealth and privilege, and tensions between Saudi Shi’ites and Saudi Sunnis.”

The kingdom has been squandering billions upon billions of petrodollars in a lost battle to finance a regional counterrevolution. Some $20bn dollars were pledged to bailout Bahrain and the Sultanate of Oman out of the Arab Spring. Three billions more was pledged recently to buy French arms to prop up the Lebanese army against the Hezbullah-led pro-Syria coalition. Several billions more have been pledged to Egypt to reinforce the successors of the ousted former president Mohamed Morsi, let alone the reportedly other billions spent on financing “regime change” in Syria. Reportedly, Obama tried to convince King Abdullah during his latest visit to bail out the transition in Ukraine.

To contain the repercussions of the Arab uprisings internally, the Kingdom has already spent even more on buying the loyalty of its own people; for the same purpose twenty Royal Orders, which were economically dominated, were issued in March 2011.

In February 2011, King Abdullah pledged more than $35 billion for housing, salary increases for state employees, studying abroad and social security. The next month the king announced another financial package worth more than $70 billion for more housing units, religious establishment and salary increase for military and security forces.

Bailing the population out of protests economically seemed not enough to secure internal stability as the kingdom, instead of relaxing the internal situation, has recently tightened the screws with the issuing of the Penal Law for Crimes of Terrorism and Its Financing on last January 31, the Royal Decree No. 44, which criminalizes “participating in hostilities outside the kingdom,” three days later and on March 7 the Interior Ministry’s “initial” list of groups the government considers terrorist organizations, both inside and around the country and both Sunni and Shiite.

“These recent laws and regulations turn almost any critical expression or independent association into crimes of terrorism,” said Joe Stork, the deputy director of the Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa region.

“These regulations dash any hope that King Abdullah
intends to open a space for peaceful dissent or independent groups,”
Stork added.

Internally and externally, the kingdom overconfidently seems intent on creating more enemies, neutralizing none, alienating world and regional powers, mainstream Sunni, Shiite, liberal, pan-Arab and leftist forces, wrecking regional havoc, all in what looks like an unbalanced reaction to threats, real and perceived, to the survival of the ruling dynasty. However, the kingdom seems like shooting its survival in the legs.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (nassernicola@ymail.com).

An edited version of this article was first published by Middle East Eye on April 15, 2014.

Morning Conversation with a Sunni Damascene Woman

We’re sitting in the cafe of the ancient home-hotel I’m staying in for a ridiculously cheap price. I’m surround by arches, wooden beams, wrought iron decor, vast ceilings and windows, daylight and call-to-prayer and church bells filtering in. Fairouz graces the space, her lilting voice a morning ritual.

the lovely, but empty of tourists, hotel I’m staying in, in the old city of Damascus

If it weren’t for the sordid reality of the various attacks on areas throughout Syria by so-called “rebels”…. pause, another round of mortar attacks just now…it would be paradise.

As it is, the people I’ve been meeting the last ten days have been as lovely and gracious as the Palestinians I’ve met over the years in occupied Palestine. And similarly, they are living under a siege… sanctions on the state which are one of the reasons life has gotten so expensive here (other reasons being “rebels” taking over factories, particularly in the north, I’m told, taking over petrol stations, taking over medicine factories…), but in spite of the higher cost of living for these people whose salaries don’t now suffice (despite free education and health care here), they are generous, as the Palestinians under occupation.

I’m talking with Qamar (which means moon) Oudabachi, a Sunni woman who
lives in the Mezze area of Damascus but works at the hotel.

She is stylish, confident, not oppressed in the least.

She speaks a bit of English, but we’re conversing in Arabic.

The accent is different than my Gazaowi-accustomed ears can handle, so I have to ask her to repeat, slow down, many times, to make sure that I understand her anecdotes. At one point I jokingly ask her if anyone in the Syrian government has put a gun to her head, to force her to speak as she is speaking, to which she laughs and replies definitely not.

Following are snippets from our discussion:

"Everything has gotten expensive here. What we used to buy for 50 lira is now 250 lira… our salaries don’t suffice now (she is not the first to lament this to me). The reason is the sanctions. Lettuce used to cost 10 lira, its now 100 lira. The farmers in areas which are not protected by the government are attacked by the “rebels,” and they don’t have fertilizer, because of the sanctions.

Transporting goods is too expensive. the “rebels” have taken over petrol stations…medicines are expensive. Most factories are in Aleppo, and most are either closed or taken over by the “terrorists.”

The factories here in Damascus do make medicine, but they have to sell it at a higher cost because of the effect of the sanctions. I have children, I worry about them going to school since the “terrorists” shelled a school last week. Last year, they shelled a school in my area, Mezze, a teacher was killed and students were injured.

"One of my relatives lived in Hama. The “rebels” would knock on the doors of homes there and force them to participate in demonstrations against the “regime.” My relative is an old woman, she said “I don’t want to participate. My legs are weak, I’m an old woman” but the “rebels” said she had to join the demonstration. They would threaten her, “we’ll kill your son, your husband.” They fled Hama soon after, to Lebanon.

"Our former housekeeper was from Zamalka, near Jobar (one area where the “rebels” are, and from where they fire mortar shells towards Damascus). Just before the “rebels” took over Zamalka, she fled, but her husband and 30 year old son stayed, to protect their home. Two months after fleeing, she saw on the news that the “rebels” had killed her husband and son by cutting their heads off.

"My cousin had a car accident, two of his children died. This was on a Friday. One child died immediately, the second the following day. While they were praying in the mosque, “rebels” came and filmed the caskets and produced a video with the title, “Damascus prayer on the field of freedom of the child martyr Abdul Salam Musa” [google translated]. My aunt in Germany saw the video and commented “This is a lie, these kids are my relatives and they died in a car accident.”

Friday, April 18, 2014

The Bangkok Protests

They really should have a dedicated flight connecting some of the cities consumed by the ‘protests’ orchestrated in Washington, London and Paris.

A flight schedule that would connect Bangkok – Beijing – Moscow – Kiev – Caracas and Havana, maybe with a southern detour to Harare, Pretoria, and Asmara. It would be a really good idea, a money saving one – for the taxpayers in Europe and North America.

Let us please not pretend, anymore, that there are spontaneous outbursts against governments that have been elected democratically and supported by the majority of people, in Eastern, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Child and hired protester

Let us be pragmatic and think of how to economize on the great spending, of those billions of euros and dollars, pushed down the throats of pro-Western NGO’s, in places like Thailand and Ukraine, South Africa and Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

The list is actually endless, while the goal is crystal clear: It is to wipe out all substantial opposition to the present Western global regime – to wipe it off from the face of the earth! And to do it, to wipe it out, as quickly and efficiently as possible, preferably by avoiding direct invasions. If hundreds, thousands, even millions of people in poor, non-white, or socialist/Communist countries die, defending their motherland or fatherland in the process, so be it. The West has never been stingy when it comes to sacrificing millions of innocent lives of ‘the others’.

The lives of those ‘niggers’ (to borrow the polite linguistics of people like Lloyd George), or those filthy Commies, were never worth anything, at least to the rulers in London, Berlin, Paris or Washington. They were not worth anything then, and they are worth nothing now. The British Prime Minister [Sir] Winston Churchill was, for instance, in favor of gassing the ‘lower grade’ of races…

Twenty million lives of Soviet citizens, hundreds of millions of people murdered in what is now Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and that is without even counting Africa.

So let us have it all out in the open: Let us push for the introduction of this round-the-world long-distance flight, in order to shuffle those agents of imperialism and neo-colonialism, those Western apparatchiks and their lackeys, their media whores and their local butlers, sometimes called ‘elites’, around.

Such a ‘service’ would save plenty of fuel, by connecting all the hotspots in a very efficient way.

Make it all business or first class, as these people are not doing what they are doing for some lofty ideals – they do it for status and for cold cash.

***

In one year I worked in, among other places, on the Turkish/Syrian border, in Egypt, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, Ukraine and Thailand.

The similarities are stunning: The tents, electric generators, people imported from poor provinces, and even the slogans!

I speak about what I witness. I speak about it and I describe it in words, and in my films. But periodically, like now, I just want to show the images, to share with my readers and viewers what is… well… so obvious!

Two weeks ago it was Ukraine, I shared images from there. Today: Let it be Thailand!

***

In Bangkok, very recently, the ‘protesters’ moved from the upper-class shopping boulevard, Sukumvit, to the enormous public park – Lumpini.

They were obviously told to get the hell away from Paragon, Emporium and the other malls! There, they were spoiling the displays of the Lotus, Rolls Royce and Ferrari cars, as well as all those of the Prada, Versace and Vuitton boutiques.

Their presence is good enough for irritating, even threatening government officials. It is good for disrupting elections (the elections are free and ‘democratic’ only when people vote for those candidates and system that the West approves of, otherwise voters get intimidated, or even massacred by ‘truly democratic forces’).

But those Thai southerners actually do stink, and they are too vulgar for the refined tastes of the Bangkok elites! So to hell with the bastards! They are paid anyway, so they can be told where to move to. They were ruining the commercial center of the city, with their pots and pans and ‘fisherman pants’.

They have to go… or else! They go, of course; they go obediently, like cattle, wherever they are ordered to go. They are paid to go…

So now there is this huge celebration of the Thai New Year – of Songkran – of the Water Festival. People are desperate, the Thai economy is screaming, all the economists are predicting a huge depression, crisis, even collapse. But what can they, ordinary people, do – they have to do something! So they celebrate. Beer, loud music, water jets, fire hoses, sirens…

People are not smiling; people are concerned. But at Lumpini Park, everything is festive there: huge high-tech screens, men in military fatigues and jackets (damn, exactly like in Kiev!), pornographic anti-government slogans (the Prime Minister is a woman, and whilst porn is banned on the net, it is quite ok to depict the head of the Thai government as a naked whore) and faces painted in bright white.

There are primitive gyms where rough elements are doing bodybuilding in the open. There are barbershops, and there are massage parlours.

There are thugs, everywhere. Just as in Kiev and elsewhere, they are ‘controlling traffic’, deciding who can pass through the occupied areas.

There are video cameras everywhere, but the police would never dare to interfere (just as in Kiev, where for many weeks they did not really dare to intervene), the army is also fully supportive of the monarchy and the elites, and would never ever dream of breaking up those that are paid for by the true rulers of the land, and their foreign handlers.

And suddenly I see it! There is this huge poster proclaiming: “THAKSIN-ISM IS COMMUNISM TYRANNY”.

Thaksin Shinawatra a Communist? That very business tycoon, a turbo-capitalist, whose only ‘fault’ was that he introduced free medical care (much better than that in the United States), improved education, housed the poor, and aimed at a much more egalitarian society than anything ever seen to date in Southeast Asia?

That was, damn, of course, unacceptable to the Thai elites, military and their foreign handlers, simply because in Thailand it is not just about money, but mainly about the gap that the rulers feel they need to maintain between them and the rest of the people. The rulers of Thailand need people to prostrate in front of them, at their feet, like elsewhere in those horrid Western colonies in Southeast Asia; and in those feudal lands, like the Philippines and Indonesia. There, people are conditioned to be slaves of the elites, while children are raised and immediately broken, ‘educated’, as slaves of their parents!

I went to talk to the people near the posters. Yudhana Chauburi and Somkiat Korbkij, were the nearest to the sign.

“What is Communism?” I asked.

Nobody seemed to know.

I asked again and again. I asked several people. Nothing!

Then a guard approached me: “We think that Communism is… one person who is controlling everything…”

“You mean… the monarch?”

He backed up, in horror.

They all looked the same – the desperados backed and financed by the so called ‘elites’. In Bangkok or Kiev, in Harare and Caracas.

Even the price for betraying one’s country – the going rate – appears to be the same, approximately US$10 per day.

Madness of Thai New Year celebration.

Great respect for the elected government.

Celebrating during Thai New Year.

Race track in Bangkok – for those who have.

Medical camp just in case.

New symbol of Thainess.

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His discussion with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism is now going to print. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. He has just completed the feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

German TV. 10.4.14. Who were the Maidan snipers? Ukraine.

Broadcast on German television on the 10.4.2014 this investigative
report presents evidence for their having been snipers from among the
ranks of the opposition, shooting at their own people at Independence
Square (Maidan) in Kiev.

Parodying the South Korean video, ‘Gangnam Style,’
which topped charts in mid- 2012, soon after breaking records for
most-watched Youtube video, Gaza’s version injects the sordid realities
of Palestinians’ lives under Israeli military occupation and the
years-long choking siege of the Strip.

“We wanted to do something to bring focus to the plight of Palestinian political prisoners, of which there are around 5,000 in Israeli jails, including hunger strikers, children, women,” says Mohannad Barakat, 30, one of seven Palestinians who made ‘Gangnam Gaza Style.’

“We wanted to tell the outside world about the impossible circumstances under which we live: that our airport has been destroyed, our fishers are prevented from accessing their sea, that half our population is out of work, that we use tunnels instead of border crossings and donkeys because fuel is scarce.”

The Gazan rendition of the Korean dance video highlights some of Gaza’s most urgent problems under siege, including daily power outages, fuel shortages, lack of freedom of movement, and unemployment. Dressed in black, heads wrapped with the traditional black and white Kuffiyehs (scarves), five men and two children dance a fusion of ‘Gangnam style’ and Dabke, the energetic dance found in many Arab countries.

“In our video, as we show how the siege and Israeli occupation impact on our lives, we hold our hands crossed in front of us, symbolizing Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails,” says Barakat.

The four and a half minute video moves from Gaza’s coast, polluted with the untreatable sewage pumped into the sea at the rate of 90 million litres per day, to gas-less filling stations, to the tunnels which serve as border crossings and bring Israeli-banned construction materials into Strip, long devastated by Israeli-bombing.

The theatrical bomb explosion in the original Gangnam Style video also more appropriately appears in the Gazan version: with two major Israeli offensives on the Strip in the last four years, and numerous other Israeli attacks before and in between, Gaza’s Palestinians are all too familiar with bombings.

Wassim abu Shabaan, 10, one of the two children in the clip is one of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza whose homes have been destroyed by Israeli bombing and bulldozing.

“The whole house was destroyed, everything was destroyed…our computer, my room, our clothes, everything,” says the boy of the 2009 Israeli bombing of his home.

“Palestinian children can recognize the difference between an F-15 and an F-16 warplane, and the difference between drones armed with missiles and surveillance drones, just by their sound,” says Mohannad Barakat.

“We put children in our video so that people will understand that they are exposed to all the difficulties and dangers of life here in Gaza.”

“Our children have nowhere to play.” They play in streets, camp alleys…the few parks that there are are in disrepair or were damaged by Israeli bombings, as with Barcelona park in Tel el Howa, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in the 2008-2009 war on Gaza.

The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme found in 2009 that over 91 percent of children in Gaza suffer from moderate to severe PTSD. Children make up roughly half the population of Gaza’s 1.7 million people.

“A large percentage of children in Gaza, even those in their teens, have anxiety and PTSD, wet themselves, have nightmares and wake screaming…Since the Israeli bombing often occurs during the night, many children associate darkness (and power cuts) with danger and the fear of being bombed says Mohannad Barakat.

“All of us are affected by the siege and the various Israeli wars on Gaza. We all have psychological problems from living under these circumstances. We hadn’t recovered from the 2009 Israeli war on Gaza when the 2012 attacks occurred.”

Gaza’s infrastructure had likewise not recovered from the attacks and the siege, with hospitals reporting consistent shortages of essential medicines and medical supplies, and Gaza’s schools severely overcrowded, the vast majority of whom run double, even triple, shifts to accommodate all of the students.

Since 2006, when Israel bombed Gaza’s sole power plant, the entire Strip has been under daily rolling power outages, ranging from 18 and 20 hour outages in the worst years to the current 8 hours on, 8 hours off scheduled outages.

“It’s the 21st century but Gaza still has almost no electricity,” says Barakat. “The use of candles and generators indoors during power outages has caused a number of fires and carbon monoxide poisoning deaths in recent years.”

The Strip is currently enduring another crisis of cooking gas shortages, particularly hard during winter months when hot meals and beverages help make up for the lack of heating in the typically-uninsulated homes.

The problem of sewage treatment has yet to be solved, for want of building materials to expand Gaza’s outdated sanitation facilities. The combination of power outages and little clean water to begin with contributes to a general water crisis, with 95 percent of Gaza’s water undrinkable by WHO standards.

A 2012 United Nations report entitled “Gaza in 2020: a Liveable Place?” predicts that Gaza’s sole aquifer, already over-tapped and under-replenished will fail by 2016.

The WHO reports that at least 81 patients have died due to delayed medical referrals since 2008 alone. In 2012, Palestinian authorities reported over 400 kidney patients were at risk due to lack of essential dialysis equipment shortages.

In June, 2012, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP-UK) reported that “prior to the military offensive, zero-stock levels of 40% of essential drugs and 65% of medical supplies were a major concern – and currently remain so. Shortages include lifesaving drugs, such as those needed to treat cancer and cardiovascular disease, as well as psychotherapeutics and kidney dialysis products.”

MAP-UK also reported that 10 percent of children under 5 years old suffer chronic malnutrition, while anaemia is rampant among pregnant women.

Since 2007, the Israeli army had killed 2,300 Palestinians, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ June, 2012 report. Tens of these deaths, and hundreds of the 7,700 injuries the UN reported before the Nov 2012 Israeli attacks, have occurred in Gaza’s border regions and on the sea, where fishers and farmers alike are targeted by the Israeli army as they work.

The Israeli-imposed “buffer zone” cuts Gazan Palestinians off from 35 percent of their agricultural land, impacting on their economy and local food sources.

Produce once exported to the rest of Palestine and to European markets, along with textiles and furniture, have not been exported since 2006, save an insignificant amount. The same June 2012 UN report notes that Gazan exports “have dropped to less than 3 percent of 2006 levels.”

Legal and human rights group, Al Haq, notes that “the closure also imposes severe restrictions on workers and students. Before 2000, over half a million workers exited Erez every month, and until 2006, 900 left Gaza daily. Israel revoked the workers’ permits and now only allows severely limited travel to the West Bank. …Since the closure, students from Gaza are forbidden by military order to obtain a permit to study in a university in the West Bank.”

Some of Gaza’s most desperately poor work in the hundreds of tunnels running to Egypt. As of June 2012, the UN noted that “at least 172 Palestinian civilians have been killed while working in tunnels,” since 2007.

Although most of the young men in ‘Gangnam Gaza Style’ have studied or are currently studying in post-secondary education, nearly all are unemployed. “Unemployment is higher than most people know in Gaza, it’s at least 60 percent of the working age population,” says Barakat.

“An Israeli commented on our video that Gaza has new cars, nice houses, wealthy people…that we weren’t showing the reality of Gaza. In fact, the reality is worse than what we showed,” Barakat says.

“The problem of unemployment hasn’t been solved, nor of power cuts, political prisoners, the border crossing… Which siege has been lifted? Even now the Rafah border isn’t completely open. There are many people who cannot cross the border, they aren’t allowed. My passport has twice been rejected at the Egyptian border, so have my friends’ passports. There’s no regulation at the border, it’s however the Egyptians want. Not everyone can pay $200 bribe to the Egyptian border authorities in order to cross.”

In a Sept 2012 Op-Ed to the Guardian, Robert Turner, Gaza Director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, wrote:

“Allow the people of Gaza to enjoy the standards of development and economic prosperity for which they yearn. They are capable of self-sufficiency. Let us address the root causes of this looming disaster rather than expecting the international community to foot the bill to mitigate their disastrous consequences.”

Earlier, in June 2012, Valerie Amos, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said: “this amounts to a collective punishment of all those living in Gaza and is a denial of basic human rights in contravention of international law.”

Flyers Telling Jews To Register Are Not From the Donetsk People's Republic - Moscow Does Not Negotiate For the Donetsk People's Republic

On Thursday the Russian Federation, U.S., EU, and the U.S. imposed coup government of Kiev agreed on terms for the surrender of the anti-coup uprising in eastern Ukraine. The agreement between these powers demands the workers of eastern Ukraine to lay down their arms and abandon seized buildings. Supposedly representing the working class of eastern Ukraine was the Russian capitalist state, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaking for Russia.

Denis Pushilin, head of the Donetsk People's Republic, responded to this absurdity saying, "Lavrov did not sign anything for us, he signed on behalf of the Russian Federation."

Despite the lies in the corporate media of Russian intervention, fact is, what is happening in eastern Ukraine is a working class uprising against the pro-IMF and chauvinistic coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in February. This working class uprising in eastern Ukraine has seized at least 10 cities. It has also won soldiers to their side that were sent to crush the uprising. Despite western hopes, it is also not surrendering, despite what Moscow says.

In addition, reports in the western corporate media that the Donetsk People's Republic is telling Jews to register as Jews with the People's Republic authorities are false. A flyer was distributed, but it did not come from any official body of the revolutionary government. The leadership of the Donetsk People's Republic deny any connection to the flyer, despite the flyer claiming to be from it. People's Republic leader Denis Pushilin's name and forged signature is on the flyer, but he denies all connection with the forgery.

Of the forged flyer, the rabbi of nearby Dnipropetrovsk, Shmuel Kaminezki, says, "It's important for everyone to know its not true."

The masked men who circulated this forgery were obviously supporters of the neo-Nazi infested government in Kiev, passing out a forged document in an attempt to discredit the anti-fascist uprising in eastern Ukraine.

The fact that this forgery is being circulated as a legitimate anti-Semitic attack by the Donetsk People's Republic in the western corporate media should come as no surprise. They are lying about everything that happens in Ukraine in order to justify the Kiev government's war on its own people and to justify a potential war by NATO in Ukraine that could turn into a regional conflagration.

We should remember the kinds of propaganda always spewed by the corporate media in times like these, lie after lie like "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, babies supposedly taken out of baby incubators to die in Kuwait, the faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident in the U.S. War on Vietnam, and chemical weapons supposedly used by the Syrian government, to name just a few lies spewed in the corporate media used to "justify" U.S. imperialist wars. This latest slander of the Donetsk People's Republic should be seen in that light.

Now that some mainstream news reports are starting to recognize this letter as a forgery, another lie is being sent out. Some reports are making it appear that this is a kind of a tit for tat in a situation where both sides in the conflict are falsely accusing each other of being neo-Nazis. Fact is, this uprising in eastern Ukraine is legitimately concerned that actual neo-Nazis have taken key posts in the new government that call for mass executions of Ukrainian Russians without trial as well as taking away their language rights and citizenship.

With the U.S. sponsored overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine, the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party has been given several key posts in the new coup government. Svoboda is a party that celebrates Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and brutal mass murderer Stepan Bandera. It also claims Jewish gangsters control the media and those Jews plan to carry out genocide against Christians. Svoboda’s top leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, is calling for criminal penalties for speaking in the Russian language and stripping all ethnic Russians of their Ukrainian citizenship, forcing them to become non-citizens in their own land.

Within the coup government Svoboda has been given the positions of Prime Minister for Economic Affairs (Oleksandr Sych), Education Minister (Serhiy Kvit), Ecology Minister (Andriy Makhnyk), Agriculture Minister (Ihor Shvaiko), and Prosecutor-General of Ukraine (Oleh Makhnitsky). Not all posts have been given to neo-Nazis. Two other rightwing capitalist parties that have no problem working closely with neo-Nazis, the Fatherland Party and UDAR, have been given the rest of posts in the coup government.

A cofounder of Svoboda, Andriy Parubiy, has also been given the portfolio of Secretary of National Security and Defense. Make no mistake, this is a fascist given a position of command in an impending war that the capitalist state of Ukraine and its fascist thugs have begun to wage against the working class, leftists, women, Jews, and national minorities of Ukraine.

U.S., EU, NATO Hands Off Ukraine!

-Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Tendency

For more on Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, check out my other articles:

Dear NATO: Are You Lying About Russia or Simply Incompetent?

On 14 April 2014 NATO issued a “fact sheet” titled, “Russia’s Accusations – setting the record straight.” In the course of setting the record straight, the NATO fact sheet made the following false assertion: “Russian officials claim that US and German officials promised in 1990 that NATO would not expand into Eastern and Central Europe, build military infrastructure near Russia’s borders or permanently deploy troops there.”

“No such pledge was made, and no evidence to back up Russia’s claims has ever been produced.” (My emphasis.)

We know that this assertion by NATO is false, thanks to a 26 November 2009 article in Der Spiegel that claimed:

“On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., [German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich] Genscher spoke with [Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard] Shevardnadze. And, according to the German record of the conversation, which was only recently declassified, Genscher said:

‘We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.’

And because the conversation revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly:

‘As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.’”

Mr. Genscher’s assurance to Shevardnadze was similar to one made earlier to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. Mr. Gorbachev knows that such a pledge was made – and so does the former American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock.

Thus, this egregious error in the NATO fact sheet suggests either a lie or incompetent research. A deliberate lie seems more probable, given that the NATO fact sheet immediately thereafter used weasel words to deflect attention from the lie.

Here are the weasel words:

“Should such a promise have been made by NATO as such, it would have to have been as a formal, written decision by all NATO Allies. Furthermore, the consideration of enlarging NATO came years after German reunification. This issue was not yet on the agenda when Russia claims these promises were made.”

Really?

First, nobody accused NATO of making such a promise.

Second, senior U.S. and German officials would have had every right to make such a promise without ever needing to place it on NATO’s agenda. The U.S. is sufficiently powerful to enforce such a promise unilaterally.

Third, such attempts by the author(s) of the fact sheet to insert NATO into this discussion suggest that somebody has forgotten that NATO actually is subordinate to the political leaders of the member states – especially the President of the United States.

In addition, the author(s) of the fact sheet were less than scrupulous when presenting facts that supposedly refute Russia’s charge of illegitimate behavior by NATO in its Kosovo war in 1999 and the bombing of Libya in 2011.

In fact, an independent examination, titled “Short War, Long Shadow: The Political and Military Legacies of the 2011 Libya Campaign” (by the Royal United Services Institute), destroys the fact sheet with its sweeping condemnation, not only of the West’s (and NATO’s) conduct in Kosovo and Libya, but also in Bosnia in 1995 and Iraq in 2003.

“[T]hose who criticize NATO and Western governments for going beyond their [UN Security Council] mandate [in Libya] do have a point. NATO went to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties and, overall, succeeded admirably in this objective. NATO’s operation also save many lives, but an operation which was justified in purely humanitarian terms was ultimately stretched to achieving an eminently political objective: the removal of a government and its replacement by the rebels.”

One of America’s most respected Russia scholars, Stephen Cohen, claims that President Obama deceived Russia’s Vladimir Putin about the nature of the intended operation in Libya, which is why Putin refuses to trust him today. Putin admitted as much on 17 April 2014. (Clearly, Obama knows very little about Russia.) But, regardless of the source of the deception, had Russia not been deceived, it certainly would have vetoed UN Security Council Resolution 1973.

Mr. Eyal adds, “Probably the most evident departure from the spirit of Resolution 1973—was the decision of the Western powers to allow the supply of weapons and training to the Libyan rebels.”

But Mr. Eyal makes a more compelling point, one that blows parts of the NATO fact sheet out the water.

“All of the errors [in the Libya campaign] outlined above would not have been major, had they been perpetrated in isolation, or had they been confined to the Libya episode alone. Unfortunately, however, the handling of the legal framework for the Libya operation mirrors Western behavior in previous interventions, from the Bosnia operation in 1995, to the Kosovo war in 1999 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In every one of these occasions:

– A handful of Western governments used a UN Security Council resolution that lacked full backing, supposedly on behalf of the ‘international community’

– In every single case, the aim was to persuade Russia to abstain, rather than veto the resolution, on the calculation that, once this was accomplished, China would be too embarrassed to be in a minority of one to torpedo the same resolution

– At every stage, this was accomplished by fudging the real extent of the operation being contemplated

– The scope of the operation then grew and was invariably translated into ‘regime change’

– Weapons were provided to local combatants, in violation of existing provisions

– And, in every single case, once a resolution passed in the UN, Western governments precluded any further debate over its interpretation and application.”

In a word, broken promises to Russia by the West and NATO have been compounded repeatedly by insincerity, duplicity and dishonesty. And, yet, the ignoramuses who pollute American politics, the media, and our think tanks heap scorn on Russia, as if none of this has occurred.

But, notwithstanding all of the above, the most dishonest section of the fact sheet is the part that defends the so-called legitimacy of the provisional government in Kiev. Although the fact sheet contains a few weasel words about a legitimate Ukrainian parliament legitimately electing a new president and government, it remains inexcusably silent about the events leading up to that action.

The fact sheet doesn’t mention that President Viktor Yanukovych was legally elected to a five-year term in 2010. It doesn’t mention that, on the very day that the famously corrupt Yanukovych decided to scrap plans to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, Hromadske.TV commenced live broadcasts that featured a pro-American reporter calling for students and youth to gather at Independence Square to protest Yanukovych’s decision.

The fact sheet doesn’t mention that Hromadske.TV was the brainchild of America’s Ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, and that it “would prove essential to building the Euromaidan street demonstrations against Yanukovych.” (“Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev,” by Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News, 25 March 14)

Neither did the fact sheet mention, as did Russia scholar John Quigley, that “Victoria Nuland, who serves as U.S. deputy secretary of state for European affairs, stepped over a line usually observed by foreign powers when she went into the streets of Kiev in December. There, Nuland demonstratively aligned herself with the protesters and in favor of Ukraine’s affiliation with the EU. According to a recently leaked audiotape of a conversation that she had with the U.S. ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland also evidently has been strategizing on ways to alter the composition of the Ukraine government. Diplomats and foreign officials are accustomed to avoiding involvement in domestic politics. Diplomatic and consular personnel risk being declared persona non grata for such activity.”

According to Stephen Cohen, neo-con Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt were plotting the overthrow of Yanukovych’s government. And Professor Cohen made another important observation:

“One last point, also something that nobody in this country wants to talk about: The Western authorities, who bear some responsibility for what’s happened, and who therefore also have blood on their hands, are taking no responsibility. They’re uttering utterly banal statements, which, because of their vacuous nature, are encouraging and rationalizing the people in Ukraine who are throwing Molotov cocktails, now have weapons, are shooting at police. We wouldn’t permit that in any Western capital, no matter how righteous the cause, but it’s being condoned by the European Union and Washington as events unfold.”

The fact sheet says nothing about the violence perpetrated by right wing members of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. But sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, a respected expert on civil disturbances in Ukraine, believes that the far right hijacked the protest.

(Jacob W. Kipp, a world-renowned expert on Russia’s military, recently reminded me that leaders from both organizations fought against Russians in both Chechen Wars.)

The fact sheet says nothing about the sniper fire on 20 February, which commenced while Yanukovych was meeting with the opposition and EU mediators from France, Germany and Poland. Although many observers initially assumed that the snipers were Yanukovych’s men, witnesses have testified that much of the sniper fire came from Kiev’s Philharmonic Hall and the heavily guarded Hotel Ukraine. Both were under the control of the protesters that day. In fact, protesters had seized an Interior Ministry armory in Lviv the previous evening and transported those weapons to Kiev.

The fact sheet says nothing about:

“the European Union-mediated deal reached on Friday, [21 February 2014] in which opposition leaders Vitaly Klitschko, Arseny Yatsenyuk and Oleh Tyahnybok and President Viktor Yanukovych agreed to refrain from using violence, while anti-government protesters had to unblock roads and squares, hand over illegal weapons and vacate the public buildings they had been occupying for months.”

“In return for the protesters backing down, presidential elections were set to be held in December and reforms were to be made restricting Yanukovych’s powers.”

“Those terms were not enough for some protesters, however, who demanded that Yanukovych step down immediately. By Saturday, law enforcement and government officials had apparently fled and protesters seized not only government buildings, but also Yanukovych’s lavish residence.” (Moscow Times, February 24, 2014, “Russia: Don’t Trust Ukraine’s Opposition,” by Natalya Krainova)

Thus, neither the EU mediators nor the opposition leaders had the courage to rein in the fascist and neo-Nazis who rejected the deal and precipitated a coup. And neither the EU mediators nor the opposition leaders had the decency to insist that the agreement reached on February 21st be honored.

Such is the “legitimate” regime that the NATO fact sheet defends with its incompetent half-truths and lies.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Lap Dancers, the CIA, Pay-offs, and BP’s Deepwater Horizon

There was CIA involvement through a company called Mega Oil. They were shipping in arms under the cover of oil tools. The BP executive was explaining to me how the CIA, MI6 and British
Petroleum engineered a coup d'état, overthrowing an elected president of
a nation who was “not favorable to BP.”

The corporation's former Vice-President, Leslie Abrahams, is pictured here, holding an AK-47 in front of BP headquarters in Baku, Azerbaijan. Like most of the other BP executives I spoke with, he proudly added that while he was working for BP, he was also an operative for MI6, British intelligence.

The conversation was far from the weirdest I had in my four-continent investigation of the real story of the Deepwater Horizon.

The BP oilrig blew out on April 20, 2010, four years ago this Sunday.

Earlier this month, the Obama Administration officially OK'd BP's right to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. And two weeks ago, just to assure the company that all is forgiven, the U.S. Department of the Interior gave BP a new contract to drill in the Gulf of Mexico–right next to where the Deepwater Horizon went down. At the same time, the forgive-and-forget U.S. Justice Department has put the trial of David Rainey, the only BP big-shot charged with a felony crime in the disaster, on indefinite hold.

The Deepwater Horizon blow-out incinerated eleven men on the rig and poisoned 600 miles of Gulf coastline. What political fairy dust does BP keep in its pocket to receive virtual immunity from the consequences?

To understand what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico, and how BP became a corporate creature beyond the reach of the law, British television network Channel 4 sent me on a four-continent investigation through a labyrinthine funhouse of bribery, lap-dancing, beatings, Wikileaks, a coup d'état, arrests and oil-state terror.

I found the cause of the tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon seven thousand miles from the Gulf in the ancient city of Baku, the Central Asian caravan stop on the Silk Road.

For the interview with agent Abrahams and the full story of the Deepwater Horizon, see, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, the documentary which will be available as a download without charge for the next two days courtesy of the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund.

The literal source of Soviet power until 1991, Baku has been exporting petroleum for 3,000 years. As the Soviet Union shattered into pieces that year, BP set its sights on the city. It is now the capital of the new nation of Azerbaijan, which sits atop the biggest untapped oil field in the world, right beneath the Caspian Sea.

A coup for BP

BP Chairman Lord Browne flew into Baku as soon as the young state elected its first president. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher joined him via the “Iron Lady,” a plane the corporation outfitted especially for her. At a state dinner, Browne handed BP Vice-President Abrahams a briefcase and showed him the contents: a check for $30 million. Browne then gave the check to the president of Azerbaijan.

Still, the new president remained “not favorable” to BP's demand for control of the Caspian oil, so MI6, the CIA and the corporation went into action. The spy agencies armed and empowered the former Soviet KGB chief Heydar Aliyev, who in 1993 overthrew Azerbaijan's elected government. Once he became dictator, Aliyev named himself president for life and within four months signed a no-bid deal to give the reserves to BP.

BP and MI6 man Abrahams was instructed, he told me, to “smooth the way” for the deal by taking Azeri officials to London in Lord Browne's jet for weekends of lap-dancing and other entertainment. By Abraham's own estimation, he paid over $3 million in additional cash bribes to make certain BP would have no trouble.

I should note that Abrahams broke no law: bribery by a British subject was legal then. BP did not deny the pay-offs when I questioned them directly, and MI6 officers proudly confirmed the coup d'état's purpose of locking in the offshore deal for BP.

Quick-dry, quick-kill cement

What does this have to do with the blow out of the Deepwater Horizon?

This: It is now well established that the disaster occurred when the cement used to cap the well failed, allowing explosive methane gas to fill the rig and transform it into a sinking fire ball.

But this was not BP's first cement failure and explosion. Just 17 months earlier, BP's Caspian Sea Transocean rig suffered exactly the same fate.

The cause of the two blow-outs was identical. In the Caspian as in the Gulf, BP laced its cement with nitrogen gas. The nitrogen bubbles sped up the drying of the mixture, saving BP half a million dollars a day on rig rental charges. But in offshore high-pressure zones, nitrogen-spiked cement can fail. And it did. Twice.

Question: Why in the world was BP allowed to use this insanely dangerous “quick-dry” cement just after a failure in the Caspian? Answer: A cover-up–via threats, beatings, arrests, bribery, perjury and the complicity of the U.S. State Department.

I only learned of the prior blow-out because of a coded message from the Caspian Sea received from one very nervous eye witness. To get the evidence, I flew to Baku and headed across the road-less desert to find more witnesses.

But we had been ratted out. My crew was placed under arrest by Azerbaijan's secret police. While they demanded our film, I was allowed to keep my pen, which was actually a hidden camera. (I've learned a few things from Maxwell Smart.)

How do you keep a monstrous blow-out from going public? As one of the arresting cops told us with odd pride, “BP drives this country.” It drives it with cash. Robert Ebel, former chief of oil analysis for the CIA, estimates that at least $140 million of payments by BP for Azeri oil has gone unaccounted for. Where did it go? Notably, the Aliyev ruling family lives like pashas despite the president's official salary of $100 a month.

Oil worker advocate Mirvari Gahramanli said she was beaten by police for raising questions. In case I doubted it, she showed me photographs of a dozen cops slamming her with long clubs.

What's worse, while I was tossed out of the country (it would have looked bad to throw a TV reporter into a dungeon), my witnesses disappeared.

Wikileaks and oily lies

Just five months before the Deepwater Horizon spill, BP Vice-President for Gulf Exploration David Rainey testified before the U.S. Congress that the company had drilled offshore “for the last 50 years in a manner both safe and protective of the environment.”

BP's testimony was a lie. The Caspian rig blew out a year earlier.

But the lie was good enough for Congress. Based on Rainey's assurances, legislators pressured the Department of the Interior to drop objections to plans for drilling in the Gulf's deep waters.

Withholding information from Congress is a felony crime. But Rainey has one heck of a defense: the U.S. State Department was in on the cover-up.

Deep in the pile of confidential State Department cables released by one courageous U.S. soldier, Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, we have the notes from a secret meeting between the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Anna Dearse, and the chief of BP's Caspian operation.

The hugger-mugger was demanded by BP's American partners, Chevron and Exxon. The U.S. oil companies had complained to the State Department that they were no longer getting their piece of the Caspian loot and BP wouldn't tell them why. (You'll remember that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a member of Chevron's board of executives.)

In the memo, which you can see in our film, Vultures and Vote Rustlers, the U.S. Ambassador provides the details of the blow-out of the bad cement on the BP rig.

The State Department kept schtum, not even warning U.S. safety regulators. And Exxon and Chevron's chiefs joined BP's Rainey in the mendacious sales pitch to Congress, testifying, despite their knowledge, that their offshore drilling methods were safe as a game of checkers.

Justice is not always abused: David Rainey was indicted for felonious obstruction of Congress. However, the charge centers on a relatively minor falsehood: his alleged understatement of the amount of oil bursting into the Gulf. Neither Rainey nor BP will be tried for the deadlier lie to Congress -- the prior blow-out caused by the penny-pinching quick-dry cement -- because the U.S. government is itself complicit in the cover-up.

Blow-backs and blow-outs

And that's why we are seeing the red carpet rolled out for BP in the Gulf once more.

When the U.S. government participates in the corruption of other democracies, when it authorizes bribery and ignores police-state tactics to benefit from business deals, the sins of empire can come back to haunt the nation. In the CIA's world this is called “blow-back.” What was covered up in Baku has killed Americans in the Gulf, and it will likely continue to kill.

And bribery does not simply stay “over there.” American officials are not as different from the Baku bandits as they may like to believe. The agency in charge of regulating BP's drilling in the Gulf, the U.S. Minerals Mining Service, was rife with watchdogs who, like their Azeri counterparts, took backhanders and pay-outs from BP. And when I say BP was in bed with the regulators, that is not a metaphor: a BP lobbyist was sleeping with a chief of the agency.

Don't bother sending David Rainey a file in a cake: the BP man won't get two minutes of jail time. His trial has been suspended indefinitely.

Immunity from law is not new to BP. As I reported two weeks ago, BP was the main culprit in the disaster caused by the Exxon Valdez grounding. The company walked away without paying a dime to the victims. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, a few tenacious attorneys have ensured the corporation pays some compensation in the Gulf. But that money comes nowhere close to the damage it caused and will do nothing to harm the company's bottom line.

The oil is still there

Today BP has declared Gulf waters clean, as if Mother Nature were just a toilet you can poop in and flush. But I've been to the Gulf shores. Dig down ten inches in the shoals off Gulfport and you'll hit Deepwater Horizon crude. Biologist Rick Steiner tells me BP's poisonous sludge will remain just under the surface for another 40 year. Hidden–just like BP's crimes.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic, inside his investigations from the Arctic to the Congo, hunting down rogue billionaires. Palast’s reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.

Watch Palast’s report BP in Deep Water on Free Speech TV, this Sunday at 7pm & 9pm ET. Check out the trailer here.

Greg Palast is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Community and student groups hold a demonstration in Montreal against austerity

by CASA

In Quebec today the extreme austerity politics of the Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ) are a serious threat. Since the recent election the Liberals have already indicated that serious “reform” to education and health care are pending, we understand very well that “reform” means the economic strangulation of these important public institutions.

As we clearly saw over nine years of the previous Liberal government, under the corrupt and corporate-driven leadership of Charest, the Liberals hold a vision for Quebec society that seeks to undercut many of the collective social gains of the Quiet Revolution.

After 18 months of a PQ government we are under no illusion that the PQ holds a different economic vision from the Liberals, one which prioritizes the profits of the corporate sectors while squeezing the economic well-being of the poor and working majority.

As always, these austerity attacks disproportionately affect women and immigrant workers, who are pushed towards precarious employment–this structural sexism and racism is every bit as vicious as the “charte xénophobe.” The need to build a feminist, anti-racist response to these attacks is urgent.

Attacks from the Harper government, meanwhile, are also unrelenting: the assault on Canada Post, on unemployment insurance, on workers’ pensions. We can simply not tolerate this federal government’s vision of an austerity economy built on the backs of the women and the poor, fuelled by polluting oil, and exploiting stolen indigenous resources.

Today we are taking the streets for not only the first anti-austerity demonstration in Montréal after the elections, but also an occasion to strengthen our long-term commitment to this fight for social and economicjustice. Also we aim to take the streets today to draw a clear connection in our fight against austerity in Quebec to the fight against austerity across Canada, with the hopes of contributing to a pan-Canadian movement to challenge the extreme economic violence of the Conservatives.

The United Nations’ IPCC is the world’s most respected authority on climate.

This IPCC report was four years in the making. It embraces several hundred climate scientists and more than a thousand computerized scenarios of what might be happening to global weather patterns.

The panel’s work has definitively discredited the corporate contention that human-made carbon emissions are not affecting climate change. To avoid total catastrophe, says the IPCC, we must reduce the industrial spew of global warming gasses by 40-70 percent of 2010 levels.

Though the warning is dire, the report offers three pieces of good news.

First, we have about 15 years to slash these emissions.

Second, renewable technologies are available to do the job.

And third, the cost is manageable.

Though 2030 might seem a tight deadline for a definitive transition to Solartopia, green power technologies have become far simpler and quicker to install than their competitors, especially atomic reactors. They are also far cheaper, and we have the capital to do it.

The fossil fuel industry has long scorned the idea that its emissions are disrupting our Earth’s weather.

The oil companies and atomic reactor backers have dismissed the ability of renewables to provide humankind’s energy needs.

But the IPCC confirms that green technologies, including efficiency and conservation, can in fact handle the job---at a manageable price.

The IPCC report cites nuclear power as a possible means of lowering industrial carbon emissions. But it also underscores considerable barriers involving finance and public opposition. Joined with widespread concerns about ecological impacts, length of implementation, production uncertainties and unsolved waste issues, the report’s positive emphasis on renewables virtually guarantees nuclear’s irrelevance.

But the designs are untested, with implementation schedules stretching out for decades. Financing is a major obstacle as is waste disposal and widespread public opposition, now certain to escalate with the IPCC’s confirmation that renewables can provide the power so much cheaper and faster.

With its 15-year deadline for massive carbon reductions the IPCC has effectively timed out any chance a new generation of reactors could help.

And with its clear endorsement of green power as a tangible, doable, affordable solution for the climate crisis, the pro-nuke case has clearly suffered a multiple meltdown.

With green power, says IPCC co-chair Jim Skea, a British professor, a renewable solution is at hand. “It’s actually affordable to do it and people are not going to have to sacrifice their aspirations about improved standards of living.”

Nato's Action Plan in Ukraine is Right Out of Dr Strangelove

I watched Dr Strangelove the other day. I have seen it perhaps a dozen times; it makes sense of senseless news. When Major TJ "King" Kong goes "toe to toe with the Rooskies" and flies his rogue B52 nuclear bomber to a target in Russia, it's left to General "Buck" Turgidson to reassure the president. Strike first, says the general, and "you got no more than 10-20 million killed, tops".

President Merkin Muffley: "I will not go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler."

General Turgidson: "Perhaps it might be better, Mr President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books."

The genius of Stanley Kubrick's film is that it accurately represents the cold war's lunacy and dangers. Most of the characters are based on real people and real maniacs. There is no equivalent to Strangelove today because popular culture is directed almost entirely at our interior lives, as if identity is the moral zeitgeist and true satire is redundant, yet the dangers are the same.

The nuclear clock has remained at five minutes to midnight; the same false flags are hoisted above the same targets by the same "invisible government", as Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations, described modern propaganda.

In 1964, the year Dr Strangelove was made, "the missile gap" was the false flag. To build more and bigger nuclear weapons and pursue an undeclared policy of domination, President John F Kennedy approved the CIA's propaganda that the Soviet Union was well ahead of the US in the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This filled front pages as the "Russian threat". In fact, the Americans were so far ahead in production of the missiles, the Russians never approached them. The cold war was based largely on this lie.

From China to Ukraine, the US is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato enlargement project. Reneging on the Reagan administration's promise to the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand "one inch to the east", Nato has all but taken over eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato's military build-up is the most extensive since the second world war.

In February, the US mounted one of its proxy "colour" coups against the elected government of Ukraine; the shock troops were fascists. For the first time since 1945, a pro-Nazi, openly antisemitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital.

No western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism on the border of Russia. Some 30 million Russians died in the invasion of their country by Hitler's Nazis, who were supported by the infamous Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA) which was responsible for numerous Jewish and Polish massacres. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, of which the UPA was the military wing, inspires today's Svoboda party.

Following a 13-year rampage that began in stricken Afghanistan well after Osama bin Laden had fled, then destroyed Iraq beneath a false flag, invented a "nuclear rogue" in Iran, dispatched Libya to a Hobbesian anarchy and backed jihadists in Syria, the US finally has a new cold war to supplement its worldwide campaign of murder and terror by drone.

A Nato membership action plan – straight from the war room of Dr Strangelove – is General Breedlove's gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. "Rapid Trident" will put US troops on Ukraine's Russian border and "Sea Breeze" will put US warships within sight of Russian ports. At the same time, Nato war games in eastern Europe are designed to intimidate Russia. Imagine the response if this madness was reversed and happened on the US's borders. Cue General Turgidson.

And there is China. On 23 April, Obama will begin a tour of Asia to promote his "pivot" to China. The aim is to convince his "allies" in the region, principally Japan, to rearm and prepare for the possibility of war with China. By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific area. This is the greatest military concentration in that vast region since the second world war.

In an arc extending from Australia to Japan, China will face US missiles and nuclear-armed bombers. A strategic naval base is being built on the Korean island of Jeju, less than 400 miles from Shanghai and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the US. Obama's "pivot" is designed to undermine China's influence in its region. It is as if a world war has begun by other means.

This is not a Dr Strangelove fantasy. Obama's defence secretary, Charles "Chuck" Hagel, was in Beijing last week to deliver a warning that China, like Russia, could face isolation and war if it did not bow to US demands. He compared the annexation of Crimea to China's complex territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

"You cannot go around the world," said Hagel with a straight face, "and violate the sovereignty of nations by force, coercion or intimidation." As for America's massive movement of naval forces and nuclear weapons to Asia, that is "a sign of the humanitarian assistance the US military can provide".

Obama is seeking a bigger budget for nuclear weapons than the historical peak during the cold war, the era of Dr Strangelove. The US is pursuing its longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe: a "manifest destiny" made right by might.